Posted on February 4, 2009 - by Jeffrey Posner

Conference Call Combat

Phone-to-Phone Combat

Due to the virtual world conference calls are becoming increasingly popular and are frequently where you make your first impression in business. Unlike meetings, there are a different rules to play by in order to have things run smoothly and the margin for error is higher.

I love relating things back to simple concepts to demonstrate strategies; since business is a lot like playing a game, it’s only fitting that I came up with a 4-point strategy that can help you with your conference calls…

Know the Players

You have to know who you’re talking to and what “they do” and their “role” as well. Look them up on the Internet beforehand, google them (I should not even have to say that!). As long as you find the right people this is usually easy to accomplish, but this concept is double edged. Even more importantly to knowing the players on the other team is knowing the players on your team.

Now you are probably saying, I know the players on my team and hopefully you do! But how well do you know them in a conference call setting? Meetings are different; we use eye contact, hand signals, verbal cues and even under the table leg taps sometimes. All these tactics are used to keep control of the meeting and call the plays. When you are on the phone in a group setting you loose all of these indication opportunities.

Call the Plays

So how do you call the plays? You have to go more on instinct here and a lot of that comes down to the first point…Knowing “Your” Players. Learn to focus and intervene only on your specialties and let your peers do the same for theirs. If you have built a good team and you work well together, this will eventually come together with time.

The second part of calling the plays comes down to knowing when to change direction. Conference calls work when only one person speaks at a time and the others pretty much wait their turn. The problem with this is that you can’t always tell if someone has a point or is headed for a tangent/brain fart. Calls can get boring and if you don’t pay attention you can miss these redirection opportunities and may end up on something sour that is really unimportant, but causes friction none the less. Have a plan and keep the call on track!

Watch for the Blitz

There is an art to discussion and we all know some people are smoother than others. In business there tends to be a lot of smooth people on the phone and this results in possible “trick questions”. What I mean by this is you may get asked a question just because they want to hear the way “you” answer it, not really what the actual answer is. Reason being is that they want to know something else but don’t want to ask you it directly. I call these blitz questions, sometimes you can see them and call a new play and sometimes you can’t and may get sacked!

Get to the Playoffs

Keep moving forward no matter how good or bad you think the call went. The whole point of these calls is to get to a real meeting that eventually results in some sort of deal. This may not apply to all calls since conference calls are done everyday for many different reasons, but here we are talking about the initial calls for obtaining business.

Try to identify and push towards the next step. Listen to what the other party thinks the next step is; maybe it’s better than yours! Stay open towards the end of the call and let people add their concluding thoughts before you push to hard in one direction.

Practice, Review and Learn

In conclusion, you need practice by being a part more and more conference calls, review the calls and then learn from your mistakes. My peers and I have a system for this; we do post conference call “conference calls”. Usually immediately after the call we all jump back on another call with just ourselves and discuss the previous call.  In the beginning you may want to even record the call so you can listen to it at a later time and hear where you possibly went wrong or missed and opportunity. I use a great service called freeconferencecall.com, it’s free and allows you to record conversations and then have them emailed to you in an mp3, pretty nifty.

Conference Calls about Conference Calls!?!?! Who said business is always exciting?